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i the blossom of war
For the long, long canker of peace is over and done
And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep,
And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames
The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.
Tennyson, Maud (1855)
In 1854, Britain entered into a full-fledged war for the first time in forty
years. The nation had, in Matthew Arnold’s words, been “[w]andering
between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born.” 1 The
Crimean War served as midwife to the age. Led by an army composed of
“the old men of the past,” as The Times called survivors of the Napoleonic
wars, Britain marched into an uncertain future.2 Historic foes stood
together, as Britain’s imperial interests led it to ally itself with France,
in defense of an “infidel” nation (Turkey), against a Christian enemy
(Russia). The telegraph was used for the first time in British military
operations, while trench warfare during the siege of Sebastopol prefigured
the fighting conditions of World War I. The first war correspondents,
both writers and photographers, reported the action for a news-hungry
nation. And the businesslike idea of the management (and mismanagement) of war dictated public opinion, as initial popular support gave way
to disillusionment and then outrage – enough to topple a government –
when those same correspondents described the bureaucratic bungling
at the front. This book examines responses in word and image to the
two-year-long Crimean War. As the predominant topic of public and
political discourse during the day, the war can be used to shed light on
social questions. The Crimean War created and crystallized trends in
cultural development, and contemporary reactions to it were guided by
expectations shaped by literature and art. Representations of the war
1
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The Crimean War in the British Imagination
show the strains of a nation negotiating ideas of heroism and patriotism
during a campaign distinguished more by blunder than by glory.
When Karl Marx, writing for the New York Tribune, wanted to
pinpoint what was typically British about the parliamentary debate
leading up to the war, he turned to Shakespeare: “A singularity of English
tragedy . . . is its peculiar mixture of the sublime and the base, the terrible
and the ridiculous, the heroic and the burlesque.” Yet while the mix of
high and low modes might have been characteristic, Marx proceeded to
recognize the novelty of the current situation: “All great historical movements appear, to the superficial observer, finally to subside into farce, or
at least the commonplace. But to commence with this is a feature
peculiar alone to the tragedy entitled ‘War With Russia.’” Lamenting
the Aberdeen government’s style of leadership, he noted that even
Shakespeare never gave to “the Clown the task of speaking the prologue
of a heroic drama. This invention was reserved for the Coalition
Ministry.”3 Marx’s invocation of Englishness through literature suggests
how culture enshrines national identity. He also brings up two key issues
that Crimean War literature would have to negotiate: voice (who was
“speaking” the drama, and in what tone?) and mode (how should one
treat events that tragically combined “the heroic and the burlesque”?).
The fact that Marx’s comments were published in a newspaper makes
them a particularly appropriate place to begin a study of the cultural
impact of the war, for the press played a central role in creating this
impact. Indeed, when the curtain finally came up on the tragic farce that
was the Crimean War, it revealed a stage that was set with a newspaper
every bit as prominent as one of Ibsen’s guns: Czar Nicholas first received
the British ultimatum that led to the declaration of war by reading it in
The Times (of London), which broke the story before the statement had
traversed its official diplomatic path. And throughout its course, the war
was processed by means of words and images appearing in the press and
moving rapidly between the Eastern front and the home front. Thus the
most famous cultural product of the war – Tennyson’s “The Charge of
the Light Brigade” (1854) – was stimulated by a Times report from the
Crimea (printed a mere three weeks after the disastrous events), and the
poem itself was first published in a newspaper (the Examiner) a few weeks
thereafter. Soon, the soldiers in the East were recorded to be “singing” it
aloud and were requesting more copies of the verses (a request Tennyson
rapidly granted). In a review of the war poetry written from the front for
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, E. B. Hamley commented on the odd
consequences of such rapid transmission: “Fancy . . . the white-haired
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Nestor, and the sage Ulysses, reading, towards the close of the first year
of their sojourn before Troy, the first book of the Iliad, to be continued
in parts as a serial.”4 Hamley’s awareness of the strange effects on consumers, subjects, and producers of writing about the war must have
been underpinned by his own triple role as critic, active officer, and
author of an ongoing Story of the Campaign (then being published serially
in Blackwood’s).
This was what we would now call a “media war”: a war that was
experienced through cultural documentation not only after the fact but
as events were transpiring. No doubt bureaucratic confusions during the
Napoleonic wars had resulted in pointless deaths, too, but now the deaths
were reported almost as soon as they occurred, and the reports were being
read at home by an increasingly large and powerful British middle class.
The back and forth of information between the East and Britain resulted
in an imaginative interpenetration of home front and battlefront,
heightened by the fact that most of the deaths in the Crimea occurred
from the same disease (cholera) that was currently devastating British
communities. Visual tributes to the war frequently point to the merger of
East and West – and the role played by the media in this merger: the
monument to the Coldstream Guards in St. Paul’s depicts on its front
an image of a monument already constructed to them in the Crimea; J. D.
Luard’s painting A Welcome Arrival (1857; figure 5) shows a Crimean
officer’s hut plastered with engravings from British illustrated magazines
of both domestic and Crimean scenes.5 The ascendancy of journalism (the
subject of my first chapter) had consequences for practitioners of artistic
representation in other modes (which I treat in subsequent chapters);
what might be called the pressure of the press changed the shape of novels,
poems, and paintings about the war, either through oppositional reaction
to the dominant form, or by an attempt to accommodate its forces.6
Such a climate was bound to test conceptions of the heroic. Of course,
writers always struggle with the question of what makes someone a worthy
hero; this struggle was particularly evident in the early 1850s in Britain,
when literary journals of the day were hotly debating the proper role for
the heroic in literature and the relationship of this issue to concerns about
genre. But war compels a reconsideration of ideas of heroism. And during
the Crimean War, these ideas were undergoing significant alterations.
Initial enthusiasm for engagement in the Crimea depended in part on the
belief that it would unify a threateningly mercantilized nation, divided in
the aftermath of the “hungry ’forties,” behind a new cadre of aristocratic
and knightly heroes. Contemporary references to Carlyle’s On Heroes,
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The Crimean War in the British Imagination
Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841) and to chivalry abound;
indeed the renewed interest in the chivalric can be attributed in part to the
war. As the heroic devolved into what Marx had characterized even from
the start as burlesque, though, such a faith in heroes was replaced – or at
least offset – by an ethos of middle-class practicality, as when governmental incompetence resulted in calls in Parliament for contracting out the
war effort. Views of the military changed, too. Before the war, the
stereotypical soldier was an aristocratic fop. After it, he was a brave private
(eulogized in countless poems in Punch to “Private Smith” and his kin).
These conflicting beliefs about heroism become manifest in responses to
the charge of the Light Brigade, in which the traditionally aristocratic
cavaliers appear both as reinvigorated figures of English chivalry and as
proof of their own outmodedness, even their evolutionary unfitness.
But if the charge of the Light Brigade stands as one lasting reminder of
the Crimean War, the other remaining cultural touchstone from the
conflict must also be considered in relation to ideas of the heroic. While
the abstract common soldier was newly lauded, the great and remembered
individual hero of the war is instead a heroine: Florence Nightingale.
Nightingale’s extraordinary rise to fame sits at the intersection of the
“Woman Question” and the “Eastern Question.” In Cassandra, written a
few years before the war, Nightingale had bewailed the opportunities for
female action: “Why cannot we make use of the noble rising heroisms of
our own day, instead of leaving them to rust?”7 She herself demonstrated
what modern “[h]eroic womanhood” (as Longfellow called it in his paean,
“Santa Filomena” [1856]) might look like.8 Indeed, images of Britannia
were scattered throughout the illustrated newspapers of the day, sensational heroines pervade the war novels, and the war produced a muchlionized female military painter in Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler. Yet
at the same time, Coventry Patmore was presenting the first two parts of
his influential vision of domesticated womanhood in The Angel in the
House (1854, 1856). Thus alongside heroism, what has come to be called
“heroinism” became a topic of debate in the culture wars of the war years.
So this war can be considered as presenting a particularly revealing case
study in the fate of epic action in the period, an example of a process I and
others have described elsewhere whereby epic ambitions are caught up in
the quagmire of nineteenth-century realities and become feminized and
bureaucratized as a result.9 But it can also shed light on the role literature
and art play in these developments, and in the process whereby a Nation
revises its sense of self. Winston Churchill once remarked to Siegfried
Sassoon that “War is the normal occupation of man,” before qualifying
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his claim slightly: “War – and gardening!”10 While he was thinking of one
form of cultivation (or “blossom”), he could as easily have been thinking
of another. And in fact, the occupations of war and art are connected: war
forces a culture to memorialize itself, to see itself in the present as a
historical artifact, as something that is set in stone – or in words on a page
or paint on a canvas. Linda Colley has shown how the culture of war
contributed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the
creation of British national identity.11 Even as early as Shakespeare’s
Henry V, representative proto-Britons – English, Welsh, Irish, and
Scottish – come together (albeit uneasily) in King Harry’s “band of
brothers” in order to defeat the French at Agincourt. But as Richard
Helgerson has pointed out in describing the cultural construction of
Englishness in Elizabethan times, a “second great period of English
national and imperial self assertion” arrived with “the reign of Queen
Victoria.”12 In Westward Ho! (1855), written in the midst and in support of
the British efforts in the Crimean War, Charles Kingsley tried to use an
Elizabethan setting to “rally the troops,” military and civilian, at home
and abroad. As Kingsley’s pointed invocation of the past suggests,
mid-nineteenth-century Britain was acutely aware of different models
of historical change, and contemporary thinking about the conflict in
the East was central to Victorians’ awareness of themselves as historical
subjects. Yet if the Crimean War represents the first large-scale instance of
British self-assertion in a reign that was to be defined by it, it also sets an
ambiguous precedent. Current history indicates how war can highlight
and exacerbate not only the things that bring a people together but
also the things that divide us. Because the Crimean War was accessible
to and unpopular with the public in a completely new way, it illuminates
mid-Victorian attitudes about national identity.
By looking at the war literature and art, I track the presence of a more
modern reaction to war, one in which a sense of general futility accompanies the recognition of valor, in which the heroic and the burlesque
intermingle uneasily. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell
has shown how irony is the determining mode of responses to World
War I. Malvern Van Wyk Smith has argued that the poetry of the Boer
War first introduced concepts of irony to British war poetry; he calls
Tennyson’s “Charge” “the last great battle piece that could be written in
English.”13 Yet while the Crimean War does represent a watershed
moment, it cannot be so easily equated with the past. Mid-Victorian
earnestness generally precluded irony in favor of outrage, but since various
forms of “blunder” dominate the experience in the Crimea, imaginative
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The Crimean War in the British Imagination
reactions to the war show nascent signs of ironic technique in a kind of
bewilderment that registers both on the level of form and of content.
Critics such as Fussell and James Chandler have demonstrated how rich a
story can be told about a nation’s cultural life by focusing on its response
to a traumatic period, how much can be gained by identifying, in
Chandler’s words, “a moment in the history of a literary culture.”14 The
Crimean War, for all its brevity and blunder (actually, because of its
blunder), provides fertile terrain for such investigation.
If the Crimean War plays a crucial role in mid-nineteenth-century
cultural developments, it also foreshadows many concerns stemming from
our present “stupid quarrel about great-power stewardship” (Christopher
Hitchens’s words, used in comparing the past Eastern Question to today’s
one15) – as an early example of “Grand Strategy” politics at work, as a
window on to how public disillusionment over a war can create a climate
for cultural production, as a study in the role played by the media in the
process. There has been significant and ongoing historical interest in the
war, and two excellent books have been published on the visual art of
the conflict (by Ulrich Keller and Matthew Lalumia). But while recent
attention to imperialism in literary studies has spawned books on
responses to the so-called Indian Mutiny and to the Boer War,16 because
the Crimean War has fewer obvious connections to imperial discourse, it
has garnered less sustained consideration in the field.17 The Crimean War
in the British Imagination, the first book to be devoted to the wider
cultural effects of the conflict, seeks to offer a more comprehensive view
of these effects than can be gleaned from attending to the war’s impact on
a single writer or through a single generic lens. Literary critics of the 1850s
often concentrate on the implications of the Great Exhibition of 1851
(again, an important moment of imperial culture). But if Alexander
Smith and Sidney Dobell opened their Sonnets on the War (1855) with a
poem called “The Crystal Palace” (the site of the Exhibition), they did so
only to recognize that the transparency promised by this clear edifice had
given way to a far murkier atmosphere, in which the disembodied voices
of the war poems that follow also appear as through the fog of war. I will
delve into this fog to trace its consequences for the shape of the British
imagination.
ii a brief history of the war
In addition to the fog of war, though, we face the fog of memory. An odd
assortment of names and objects emerge from this fog: Nightingale and
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the charge of the Light Brigade, of course, but also the idea of the thin
red line and a few bits and pieces of clothing (the cardigan, named after
the earl who led the charge; the balaclava, worn to protect the soldiers’
faces against the bitter Crimean cold). These remnants are significant;
as a character remarks in Brian Friel’s Translations, “it is not the literal
past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied
in language.”18 Yet while what follows is predicated on belief in Friel’s
observation, it nevertheless helps to have some sense of the “facts” –
especially those facts to which writers and artists of the day were responding – when trying to come to grips with how “images of the past” become
“embodied” not only in language itself but in more concrete cultural
productions.
As a gauge of what has remained of the war, we can turn to W. C. Sellar
and R. J. Yeatman’s 1930 comic history, 1066 and All That, which might
be called a cousin of Frielian history in its basic premise that “History is
not what you thought. It is what you can remember.” Yet 1066 and All That
recognizes that the difficulty in remembering how Britain got into the
“exceptionally inevitable” Crimean War is paradoxically the first of its
memorable aspects (perhaps a less surprising fact if one recalls the muddle
Marx described even at the time).19 In fact, the war grew out of what was
known as the Eastern Question: the problems connected with the long,
slow withdrawal of the Ottoman Empire.20 The immediate spark was
given when a squabble broke out between Catholic (French) and Orthodox (Greek and Russian) Christians over possession of the keys to the
Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem; the disagreement fueled an ongoing
debate about who had sovereignty over Christians living within the
Ottoman Empire. But for the British, the most significant reason for
war was the fear of Russian imperial expansion. It was this fear that led
Britain to put historic prejudice to the side and take up arms with the
French after Russia encroached on Turkish territory in July of 1853.
By then, the nation was eager to go to war to save the beleaguered
Turks from being absorbed under Czar Nicholas’s authoritarian rule. Yet
the Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen – head of a coalition government that
included the strongly anti-Russian Palmerston – was less excited by the
prospect. The slow diplomatic shuffle up to war was wittily characterized
by the secretary of the British ambassador in Constantinople: “When
everyone else is dead I intend to write an Oriental romance to be called Les
mille et une notes.”21 His comments hinted forward to the bureaucratic
red-tape that would scar the Crimean campaign even while acknowledging an exotic backdrop that should have offered a contrasting form of
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The Crimean War in the British Imagination
excitement. Nevertheless, war was eventually declared, on March 28, 1854,
creating allegiances that resonate strongly with the global politics of the
twentieth century. Indeed, the Crimean War stands almost midway
between the great conflicts of what is called the long nineteenth century:
as more than one commentator has noted, 1815–1854–1914 suggests a
satisfyingly symmetrical view of historical development.
The chronology of the war can be divided roughly into five major phases.
The initial phase saw a buildup of troops in the East throughout the spring
and summer of 1854, first at Constantinople, and then at Varna (in modern
Bulgaria), where significant losses to cholera began to be reported. (At the
same time, naval conflict erupted in the Baltic. This was to continue
throughout the war, with the Allies even threatening to bombard
Kronstadt – a strategy that would have left St. Petersburg defenseless.22)
After much deliberation, the decision was made to attack Sebastopol,
Russia’s great Black Sea naval port, and troops departed to the Crimea.
Hereupon followed the second major phase of the war: a rapid series of
relatively traditional battles. First came the Battle of the Alma (a river
crossed by Allied armies on their approach to Sebastopol) on September 20.
The Battle of Balaklava (named for the nearby port town, used by the
British to transport men and goods during the siege of Sebastopol) soon
followed on October 25; it was here that the charge of the Light Brigade
occurred. Finally, on the already historically burdened 5th of November,
Russians attacked British and French siege positions before Sebastopol at
what was called the Battle of Inkerman.23 While these battles all contained
their portions of blunder (including, of course, that leading to the famous
cavalry charge at Balaklava), they could be construed as Allied victories,
and the war was generally popular throughout this period.
Nevertheless, of the three engagements, only two figure in the short list
of memorable events of the war compiled in 1066 and All That: Inkerman
is recalled for the fog in which it was fought (thus becoming an emblem of
the age in line with Matthew Arnold’s “ignorant armies clash[ing] by
night”24), and Balaklava is remembered entirely through the lens of
Tennyson’s ballad’s vision of the charge, ignoring the more successful
British effort on the day (the charge of the Heavy Brigade). Alma, the
clearest British military victory of the war, does not receive mention. One
can see how the Crimean War has been made to fit neatly – and indeed
helped create – what James Morris has called “the British mystique of
splendour in misfortune.”25
Yet the greatest source of misfortune came not from the Russians but
from the weather. While these battles were fought, winter descended on
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the Crimea. Phase three of the war began on November 14, 1854, when
a severe storm hit Balaklava, sinking twenty-one British transport
ships (including the Prince, carrying 40,000 winter uniforms and 150
men, only six of whom were saved). The losses both presaged and
contributed to the disasters of the season, as British soldiers found
themselves without adequate housing, clothing, provisions, or medical
care. Enter item four in Sellar and Yeatman’s list of memorable “facts”
of the war: Florence Nightingale, who arrived in Constantinople on
November 4 to help administer the military hospital at nearby Scutari.
In spite of efforts by Nightingale and others to contain the organizational
chaos that had sent an army to war with little thought of a winter
campaign – it was all supposed to have been over by then – thousands
succumbed to cold and disease. Indeed, by the end of the war, only 10
percent of the almost 20,000 British servicemen who died in the East had
died in action, the vast majority of the deaths occurring during the winter
of 1854–55.26 This disaster – reported on by journalists at the front – led to
the public outrage that caused the fall of the Aberdeen Government at
the end of January 1855 (Aberdeen was replaced by Palmerston after
protracted negotiations). The perception of governmental incompetence
also fueled the creation of entities like the so-called Roebuck Committee
in Parliament, formed to investigate the state of the army before
Sebastopol, and the Administrative Reform Association (with which
the likes of Dickens and Thackeray were connected), with its mission
“To bring up the public management to the level of private management
in this country.”27
But while conditions for the troops improved throughout the spring,
and while the much-maligned Commissariat Department initiated a series
of reforms that ensured that the winter troubles would not be repeated the
following year, these changes for the better did not translate into glory on
the battlefield. In fact, the nature of warfare had shifted over the course of
the season, as the fortifications of Sebastopol, engineered by the brilliant
Todleben, discouraged any rapid attempts to take the town. Instead, the
Allies put their energies into the construction of a system of trenches from
which they could bombard the defenses, hoping to weaken them in
advance of an attack. Tolstoy, who was with the Russian army in Sebastopol, captures wonderfully the discomfort, dreadful anticipation, and
sheer monotony that characterized such warfare in his Sebastopol Sketches,
written at the time. (While it was and is customary to speak of the “siege”
of Sebastopol, technically this is a misnomer since open supply routes to
the north were maintained throughout.)
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A slow and anticlimactic summer of attempts to take Sebastopol
ensued, with a major bombardment taking place in April, and then three
times in June. These bombardments, however, failed adequately to prepare the ground for the infantry attack that was to bring the fall of the
town. While the French made some headway in early June, capturing the
advance Russian defenses, the next assault, on June 17, was disastrous for
both the British and the French; the death soon thereafter of the muchmaligned British Commander-in-Chief of the Forces in the East, Lord
Raglan, was attributed to a heart broken by repeated disappointments.
Compounding their frustrations, the British were conscious of their
increasingly minor role in the proceedings, as the absence of forced
conscription (although they did turn to mercenaries) prevented the
replenishment of depleted troop numbers, even as the French army
gained in size. The result was malaise in the camps and war-weariness at
home. And when Sebastopol finally fell on September 9, 1855, reports
made clear that the victory was French; British troops botched their part
of the effort (the goal had been to take the fortification known as the
Great Redan), the troops succumbing to ignominious “confusion, panic
and terror.”28 Indeed, so tainted was the victory that Palmerston refused
to allow the usual celebratory ringing of the church bells throughout
the land; the Queen exclaimed how she could not “bear the thought that
‘the failure on the Redan’ should be our last fait d’Armes.”29
Not surprisingly, 1066 and All That distorts the memory of this event
almost beyond recognition: while the entry for “Flora MacNightshade”
crowns the chapter on the war, “The Siege of Sir Pastobol (the memorable
Russian General)” must relinquish its climactic position not only to her,
but also to the relatively extensive account of the Tennysonian-inflected
Balaklava, which in this version of history, comes last of the battles. In
contrast, Sir Pastobol (we are concisely informed) “was quite besieged,
and the English were very victorious.” This is not a place where national
memory would be disposed to linger.
Officially, the campaign was not yet over, although the armies in the
Crimea ceased to play a significant role. In its final phase, the war again
became a matter of diplomacy (the combatant nations had talked even as
the bombs fell during the “Vienna Conference” of 1855), accompanied by
some military baring of teeth as Britain amassed her strongest force yet in
anticipation of a possible naval attack on Kronstadt. Negotiations – and
Sweden’s threatened entrance for the Alliance – led eventually to the
declaration of an armistice on February 28 and the signing of the Peace
in Paris on March 30, 1856. The war ended in what has been described as
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